In this Marketing episode, Alexander Sviridiuk, Founder of Digitech Marketing. He always rewires latest digital marketing news for their colleague Visit his Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Alexander Sviridiuk podcasts!

Here are a few transcribed excerpts from Cynthia and Kelsey’s discussion, but make sure to listen to the podcast to hear everything:

What Makes a Good Subject Line?

It depends because you do have to know your audience.

The thing about subject lines is that it’s the first hurdle you have to tackle with any email marketing project. You can build a great looking email that does all the things you want it to do, but unless you get their attention with the subject line it’s a lot of waste of time.

There’s no magic formula but the key is to test your audience. Almost any good email service provider is going to provide you with the testing tool that allows you to test different subject lines.

You also really want to make sure that you’re making use of that pre-header text, the text is just below the subject line and the inbox. It gives you a great opportunity to give them a preview, especially if they’re reading on a phone, of what they might find inside. A lot of people forget to use that space to extend the marketing message beyond the subject line.

Using Emojis on Your Email

I think the key there is you want to use them sparingly. You want to really use them to get someone’s attention.

We’ve been searching for hard stats on what impact they have, and I think it depends on the audience. I think certain audiences are going to respond really well to Emojis, probably a more millennial-focused audience, whereas an older audience might not.

Some email clients will not render them properly and will give them a little black box. It just confuses the recipient and probably does not encourage them to open.

What Email Marketers are Doing Wrong

I think the key thing we see people doing wrong, as far as email marketing goes, is just sending irrelevant emails.

Our in boxes are so crowded these days and you’re not just competing with other brands. Sometimes, we get so lost in our email marketing world that we forget that we’re not competing with each other so much as we’re competing with things that really matter to the recipient. Things like their families, their bosses, their work colleagues, and everything else.

What you’re doing for them, by communicating with them via email, has to be something that’s incredibly relevant. You have to remember, they’ve invited you into their personal email zone. They’ve given you a privilege of an invitation to communicate with them directly and it feels off-putting almost, as an audience member, if a brand sends me something that is not easy to navigate, not easy to look at or to understand.